The Unknown Soldier (Edvin Laine, 1955) is one of my three favourite Finnish films, together with Loviisa (Valentin Vaala) and The Eight Deadly Shots (Mikko Niskanen, the long version).

It is the most popular film in Finland by a wide margin. It is also a cult movie in the strict sense: it has acquired a life of its own, and its quotations have become a part of folklore, although it is often difficult to distinguish whether they stem from the movie or the book. It has been much written about, theme numbers of newspapers and magazines have been dedicated to it, and books have been published about it. Distinguished essays and articles have been written about it. There would also be a demand for a full-length critical monograph, perhaps in the format of the BFI Film Classics.

Among the contemporary critics, the primus inter pares Jerker A. Eriksson found The Unknown Soldier the best war film of all, a judgment which he holds to this day. Eriksson compared it with Roberto Rossellini's Paisà, as did Peter von Bagh who I believe preferred Paisà.

The most widely repeated critical reservation about the film has been that the actors are too old for their parts. It was Edvin Laine's conscious decision to cast the film thus according to his memoir books. As much as possible he wanted to cast men who were themselves war veterans. Only ten years had passed since the end of the Second World War. Everyone in the cast knew how it had been, and one can sense it. The same decision was made by Raymond Bernard in The Wooden Crosses (1931), the most powerful film about the First World War. (Incidentally, Edvin Laine's film starts with a field burial and a mounting of a makeshift wooden cross: see image above).

Many of the actors were stalwarts of the Finnish National Theatre who brought their stage mannerisms even to this film. But this can be done sloppily or shrewdly, and the same challenge was overcome in the The Wooden Crosses. These veteran actors knew how to project, and they were instantly recognizable, which was of great advantage in this multi-character study with dozens of characters, some of which we hardly get to know before they are wiped off. It is one of the paradoxes of the actor that theatrical mannerisms do not prevent a performance from being deeply moving.

A third major critical remark, increasingly voiced today, is that the approach is too much that of a military farce, "Pekka ja Pätkä toisessa maailmansodassa" (in English that would be something like "Abbott and Costello in the Second World War"). My first comment to that would be that the same would go to the original Väinö Linna novel, as well.

The novel and the Edvin Laine adaptation have a humoristic approach. They are full of jokes and parodies. Nothing is holy in the soldiers' dialogue. They spoof Finnish patriotic slogans, Soviet propaganda announcements, and pathetic song lyrics with equal abandon. For me that is the highest aspect of realism in the story. Everyone is aware of mortality and the transience of life. Each second may be the last. Joy of life is in high regard. Humour is essential. The closer one is to death the more joy is valued. Amazingly, Linna's novel ends with the sentence: "Aika velikultia" [untranslatable but to the effect of "Jolly good fellows"].

The last time I experienced The Unknown Soldier was six years ago, at the Töölö Hospital, formerly known as the Mannerheim Hospital or the Red Cross Hospital, originally built as a military hospital. I had just been transferred from the emergency room to the ward of the most seriously injured. Many of us were living the last days of our lives. Nobody was complaining. There were screams of agony, yet everybody was in high spirits. I spent the Independence Day of 2011 there. I don't watch television, and neither did I then, but through the curtain I heard The Unknown Soldier, I lived it with everybody else, and did a sing-along in the "Elämää juoksuhaudoissa" ["Life in the Trenches"] sequence. There was no psychological boundary between the movie and us. We shared the survival story, fighting for our lives. The humour was the most important factor that made the movie real for us.

Edvin Laine was usually a hack director but when he focused on something he could be great. His greatest originality was in a homegrown approach to epic storytelling, also epic theatre in the Brechtian sense which he had internalized as a champion director of the plays of Hella Wuolijoki, a Brechtian playwright. Laine could do Aristotelian drama but, as here, also anti-Aristotelian narrative. There is no conventional identification structure, no dramatic arch, no anagnorisis, no peripeteia. This is a story of defeat in war but also a victory of the spirit. A portrait of a society in microcosm. A story of a machine-gun company grows into a story of war, a story of Finland, and a story of something universal (with themes such as the conflict between those who know and the superiors who don't, and vignettes such as the young ones who get a lesson in life too fast).

This is a war film that covers all stages of warfare: attack, trench warfare, and retreat. It introduces memorably all basic types: heroes, cowards, daredevils, responsible ones, jesters, silent ones, and clowns. It dramatizes classic models of leadership: by inner authority (Koskela) and by formal discipline (Lammio). In world cinema a comparison could be made with Fort Apache, the characters of Kirby York (John Wayne) and Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda). The Unknown Soldier also paints the portrait of the Finnish soldier who may ignore formal discipline but is a fearless fighter. In this there is an affinity with Herodotus's account of Hellenic warriors in Thermopylai, facing a tenfold enemy. They were fighting of their own free will, not in awe of their superiors. A comedy revelation is the drinking party on Mannerheim's birthday. Everybody gets drunk, but while the officers are singing "Horst Wessel", the soldiers sing "The March of the Red Guards"; both with a parodic angle.

When a critical monograph on Edvin Laine's The Unknown Soldier is written a good theme would be that of vision. Accurate and up-to-date vision is a matter of life and death. A profoundly cinematic theme, fully grasped by Edvin Laine and his ace cinematographers.

The cinematography of such a story is extremely challenging and, when successful, extremely rewarding, as can be seen in all three film adaptations. There are the four seasons with their differences. There are several night scenes, difficult to light.

The last time I saw this film on screen was 12 years ago during the last re-release of the movie as a film print; it had a commercial run at Tennispalatsi, distributed by Finnkino. The film print had been struck from the camera negative but it did not look like it. It looked like it had been prepared in haste, and there were issues of light definition and contrast all through the print.

Today the film looked better than ever, and the visual quality of the 4K DCP does justice to the cinematography, scanned from the camera negative. The contrast looks perfect, and there is fine soft detail in the landscapes. The official filmography duration is 181 min, but I have never seen a screening that long, and in today's 177 minutes everything was included, also the complete music before and after the images – and a shot that had been missing for a long time of a clenched fist in a cart carrying corpses in the finale.

There was applause after this our Centenary of Finnish Independence screening.

With Aku Louhimies's Unknown Soldier (2017) in fresh memory I realized now that the two adaptations are even more different than I had thought. There are naturally emphases common to both, most importantly the "kaveria ei jätetä" ("never abandon your buddy") ethos dramatized in the blinded Hietanen's burning ambulance scene and in Rokka carrying his best friend Susi on his shoulders across the river, although he is dangerously wounded, too.

PS. 8 Dec 2017. The soundtrack is a fascinating montage. Besides the Ahti Sonninen score and the Sibelius anthem there are Sunday school favourites ("Musta Saara"), hymns ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"), country market fair ditties ("Polle, polle, älä aisalles"), prison songs ("Hurjan pojan koti"), a White Guard anthem ("Kuularuiskumarssi"), Nazi tunes ("Erika"), Finnish marches ("Muistoja Pohjolasta"), "Kalinka" by the Red Army Choir, and parodied wartime hits ("Vartiossa"). Ahti Sonninen in his score quotes liberally from the anthems of Finnish provinces, but also from the State Anthem of the Soviet Union.

The soundtrack is more than a potpourri. When Rokka first meets Lammio the radio is on and the coloratura Miliza Korjus is singing "Warum" ("Why") composed by Theo Mackeben to the poem of Goethe, the theme song of The Student of Prague. And when the rookie Hauhia is killed by a Soviet sharpshooter music is playing in the dugout: Rahikainen is over-involved in a sing-along contest with A. Aimo's interpretation of "Elämää juoksuhaudoissa". Edvin Laine catches the accurate pitch of disparity in scenes like these. There is something comparable to John Ford in his sense of the gravity of death and the absurdity of the life force.

"Music matters": this is also understood by Koskela who orders the soldiers to drop everything unnecessary. But there will be room for music instruments.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: OUR PROGRAM NOTE BASED ON SIGHT AND SOUND (AUTUMN 1958) AND JERKER A. ERIKSSON (PARNASSO 1956):BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: OUR PROGRAM NOTE BASED ON SIGHT AND SOUND (AUTUMN 1958) AND JERKER A. ERIKSSON (PARNASSO 1956):

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